The Same Mistake
by made-in-wonder
Summary: Faltershipping. Written for YGO Rare Pair on LJ. The boy's making a stupid mistake, and the girl can't just stand by and watch.


**Disclaimer**: Yugioh is not mine.

**Author's Note**: Can be read as a sequel to my earlier story "Too Late", if anyone so desired.

* * *

The boy in the corner has been winning for three hours straight, but he hasn't smiled once.

At first he attracts only swaggering opponents, so-called duelists who pinpoint the scrawny, shrunken kid in the corner of the card shop as easy prey. He sort of trudges through the matches, eyes sunk deep in his pasty face, fingers barely twitching as he moves his cards around the table, but the end result is always the same: a flabbergasted would-be braggart and a small, monotone voice pointing out "my win".

After that the _real_ duelists start showing up, the ones who've maybe entered an amateur tournament or two, who know a true opponent when they see one and are eager for the challenge. Yet one by one, as if on autopilot, the dead-eyed ashen boy beats them too.

"My win," he always observes simply, sending his army of the dead in for the kill to the sound of a voice easily drowned by the scraping of chairs against the parlor's tile floor. "My win."

One by one, he runs out of visitors to his corner. It's just a small card shop in a small American town, after all. Those with higher ambitions have long moved on.

He's on the last duelist remaining in the store, sacrificing his own monsters to play a card he'd never wanted to own but he couldn't get out of his head – a card called "Ectoplasmer" – when his feeble pronouncement of "My win" is drowned out by a sharp, snappy voice proclaiming "You can't do that!"

For what seems like the first time in three hours, the boy blinks, looks up; his opponent scoops up their deck and bolts, deciding not to delay the inevitable. "It's not illegal," the boy points out, sounding almost dazed as he stares up at the small girl frowning down from the side of the table. "I know the rules."

The girl tosses her head with an indignant huff, her arms obstinately akimbo: vitality itself, the opposite of the living-dead boy beside her. "Not _legally_," she concedes, exuding arrogance. "But it's bad for you and your deck if you mistreat your monsters like that! Any _real_ duelist wouldn't do it." Her tone permits no contradictions.

The boy offers none, glancing down at his field again, slowly gathering its contents back into his deck. "Maybe I'm not a real duelist, then," he points out, sounding hollow and far away. "No...I _know_ I'm not."

"And you're _satisfied _with that?" The girl pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "You can't be! Otherwise you wouldn't duel!"

"But it's true, isn't it." His deck gathered into a neat pile once more, the boy just stares at it, mumbling in the back of his throat. "I tried once. But I failed." He bows his head. "I should've stayed a cheat. I should've done this sooner. Should've gone back to Bandit Keith."

"_Bandit Keith_?" The scorn in the girl's voice reverberates around the room as she scoffs, swiping the boy's deck up off the table and beginning to look through it before he can so much as start in surprise (which he does – barely). "Bandit Keith is yesterday's news! Washed-up! Gone to seed!" Cards start raining onto the table as she thins out the deck in front of her: burn spells, sacrifice spells. A coward's cards. "You need a lot more than _Bandit Keith_ to save you in the state you're in now!"

The boy sags even further in his chair, but the girl's not finished yet, a coy smile upon her lips. "Fortunately, you're in luck! The new US champion is none other than – me!"

He blinks again slowly at this news, but the girl has already plunked the remains of his deck back into his hands and is fishing around in her pocket. "Rebuild from here," she commands, finding her pocket notebook and a stub of pencil. "Your cell phone number is?"

"Don't have one," the boy shrugs as, from the doorway, an old man's voice calls "Rebecca!"

"Coming, Grandpa!" the girl hollers over her shoulder, muttering something to herself about "should've only taken half an hour" and "never running errands again" as she scribbles in the notebook herself. Ripping out a page, she presses it into the boy's hand. "Can't be helped," she sighs briskly. "Call me at seven tonight and we'll set up training to get you back into shape. And don't be late!"

The boy looks at the paper as if he's never seen numbers before. "Why..." he finally asks, as a call of "Rebecca!" comes again from the door.

"I said I'm _coming_!" calls the girl, irritated, but when she looks back at the boy her face is softer, almost kind. "I...know someone who made the same mistake once, is all," she confesses before the bossiness returns to her tone and she turns away with a little wave. "Seven tonight! Don't forget!"

The boy watches her back until her bobbing pigtails have receded out the door, then stares back down at the smudged, crumpled paper. The hint of a smile teases one side of his mouth. Something has happened today, something he's never felt before. It almost feels like trust.

He closes his hand over the piece of paper, then takes the cards the girl's weeded from his deck and dumps them all in the trash. Pocketing the paper and the remnants of his deck, he squeezes them in his palm and fancies them warm to the touch. Seven tonight, he thinks. Seven tonight.

As he heads to the door, the boy doesn't look back, doesn't look down. He just stares straight ahead, leaving his corner and shuffling out into the light of day.

He greets the sunlight with a small, but sincere, smile.


End file.
